Over the years, there have been a lot of efforts to create games that make learning how to program a computer simple and fun, with widely variable results. But indie developer Primer Labs seems to have hit on something special with Code Hero, a first-person shooter that teaches JavaScript and UnityScript programming by letting players fire bits of code that actually affect the environment. The group recently reached its Kickstarter funding goal of $100,000 for the project, and is still looking for last-minute donations to help fund a multiplayer mode.

Despite the name, Code Hero is much more like Portal or Minecraft than Guitar Hero, according to its creators, but "instead of making blocks or portals, you shoot Javascript" that executes when it hits its target. Bits of code can do anything from moving a platform down (position.z-=2) to blowing up stuff (add(ForceTransform(1000000))). "Editing code is actually a lot of fun when you look at it from the perspective of a game you can play with it," Primer Labs' Alex Peake said in the game's Kickstarter introduction.

The team has been "eating ramen or worse" to make a beta version of the game, which got an amazing response at last year's Minecraft-focused Minecon convention in Las Vegas, Peake said. Despite the ambitious nature of the project, the $100,000 budget goal was designed to fund the team of four programmers and two artists for six months of work. They hit that goal with roughly two days left before tonight's funding deadline, thanks to a sudden surge of promotional interest from sites like reddit. Now the team has set a new target of $200,000 in funding so it can hire an experienced Unity developer to help create a multiplayer mode.

Backers can get access to the final game with a donation of as little as $1, a price Peake says was set so low because "we're not about the margin or the cost or the monetization—we're about the programmerization." The Kickstarter page laments the fact that, despite the enormous impact of computers on society and the world, "less than 1 percent of humans can code."

Indeed, the team can be a bit grandiose in its ambitions to change the world through its game. "We believe in a world where knowledge becomes playable, and we believe it's not up to us to make it, it's just up to us to teach you to make the games that need making, to change the things that need changing, so we can create the world we wish to see by coding the change we wish to see in the world," Peake says in the video introduction.

The funding success makes Code Hero one of only a handful of game-related Kickstarter projects to raise a six-figure sum through the service, including the still-growing, $2+ million raised by Double Fine for its adventure game project. While that's still next to nothing in the world of AAA game development, it's further proof that new funding models can help bring ambitious, offbeat games to life, as long as there's a provable demand from the players.

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in Pittsburgh, PA.